Webconsuls Blog

Monday, July 28, 2008

There is a world out there, more of a world. With the push of a button, a million possibilities await you; this Utopia is smaller than a note card, and lives inside your pocket. The new IPhone is the cutting edge of technology, the Alpha y Omega; there are many instruments that try to compete and at the surface appear to be similar, but with a little investigation you find something quite unique.

Your music, photos, and email accessible with a touch-screen, is only the tip of the iceberg; real time GPS and any kind of application you could think of, with more to come. The question is not what your IPhone can do? Rather, what can your IPhone not do? Having the ability to manage your social media real time makes social media more universal. Millions of web sites have and are making their pages IPhone friendly; companies have become aware of the implications and the potential of this virtual treasure chest. Wake up on time, plan your day, work from anywhere, and do all of this while listening to your favorite tunes! On a daily basis I find something new and exciting regarding the capabilities of this hand held computer. I am experiencing the joy of this product, like no other gadget I have ever had; at times the excitement can be too much to handle.

I can still remember: my first desktop, my first laptop, my first Discman, and my first IPod. The desktops were bulky and slow and were inefficient; speed got better, but what about size? Laptops made up for the size problem, and for a time satisfied your needs; but you could never fit your laptop into a pocket. Discmans made sound mobile, but they skipped and you had to carry all your cds with you wherever you went. IPods held all the music you wanted and could fit into a pocket, but in a pocket already containing: car keys, cell phones, palm pilots, and whatever else one carries with them daily. Was all the clutter convenient?

It seems like so long ago that I started this technological ride into the future. I felt like I was on the brink of something amazing taking place; with every year that passed, the horizon became closer. The anticipation of a new gadget that would make my computer more universal, faster, and a little better was what I dreamed about. The release of the IPod was the pinnacle of technology when it came to media; first with music and recording, and then with video. I was satisfied beyond belief with IPod, and wondered where Apple could go next with this device? A phone? An IPhone?

With the advent of the IPhone it became very clear that the sky was the limit. You could now manage your whole life with this masterpiece; from organizing your media, all the way to managing your business, work and play had truly become One. Isnt that what life is about? The freedom to accomplish your needs from wherever you exist at any given moment; especially in this fast paced world, a world where every second counts, when he who arrives first gets the prize. The plot has been set, the characters are in their right places; I welcome you to the climax, enjoy!

Saturday, July 26, 2008

Dr. Randy Pausch, the charismatic Carnegie Mellon professor known for his "Last Lecture" and celebrated for his co-founding of the Entertainment Technology Center and the creation of ALICE, which uses his famed “head fakes” to teach 3D programming, died on July 25, 2008 at the age of 47 from complications related to pancreatic cancer.

Tuesday, July 15, 2008

America is addicted to foreign oil.

It's an addiction that threatens our economy, our environment and our national security. It touches every part of our daily lives and ties our hands as a nation and a people.
The addiction has worsened for decades and now it's reached a point of crisis.

As imports grow and world prices rise, the amount of money we send to foreign nations every year is soaring. At current oil prices, we will send $700 billion dollars out of the country this year alone — that's four times the annual cost of the Iraq war.

Friday, July 11, 2008

Google AdWords does provide a way internally to get suggestions for keywords in your marketplace, its called the Keyword Tool. This tool is found when drilling into the account at the 'keyword' level. This means you have clicked past both the Campaign and Ad Group levels to display your keywords and ads.

This tool is free to AdWords users, so great right. Well in the past not as much because depending on what you gave the tool as a starting term for more suggestions, the tool spit out those suggestions from most general (least useful) to specific. Furthermore, the only information associated with these suggestions was 2 simple horizontal bar graphs detailing, 'advertiser competition' and 'search volume'. So hopefully your are following me in that no numeric data was given whatsoever.

Now Google has expanded the tool to return suggestions with 'approximate search volume' for the last month and 'approximate average search volume' with an actual value. Practically speaking, your campaign has only to spend a predetermined amount any way, so its not as if one regularly finds him or herself adding up search volumes, but it is nice to quantify what Google used to shove into a half inch blue bar.

When it comes down to it, we need to have all the necessary keywords in the PPC account regardless of search volume because we need to target what it is we have deemed necessary in achieving our projected goals. That is, we do the best we can with what we can in the given market with a given budget for a certain business model. But I can say it is significant that Google's Keyword tool is a bit more useful, and frankly it is nice to see Google sharing any real data with us at all. I'm sure tired of getting email replies that might as well have been some fraction of a bar graph. But Google must be listening to the people to some extent in changes as little as this one.

Now you will need to update your iTunes, in iTunes Store search for "apps" then click on the title of one of the free apps and try to "Get App" this will prompt you to download and upgrade your iTunes. Do so, and run iTunes and plug in your iPhone.

PLEASE FULLY SYNC BEFORE MOVING FORWARD!!!!

You install your iPhone firmware to 2.0 by manually by pressing the "Option key" on your Mac or the "Shift Key" in Windows when you are pressing the "Check for Update" button for your iPhone in iTunes. You can then navigate to where you saved the iPhone1,2_2.0_5A347_Restore.ipsw file and click open. And you are walked thru the remaining steps! It is that easy!

Tuesday, July 1, 2008

When out and about, Lisa and I are "Life Streaming" using Brightkite, Twitter and Plurk.

It added a whole new dimension to our trip to Tucson.

By sending a SMS message to BrightKite with our location, @ Blythe for instance, Then sending shots we were taking with our iPhones via email to BrightKite where they were then tagged with that location.

As BrightKite posted the picts they tweeted them for us so those that were following would be notified of new content. (HI MOM!)

With the actual conversation taking place on Plurk, where we could use the direct link to all of those iPhone/BrightKite images we took the time to share.